The Internet is a carrier for many forms of media content. The Internet operates in conjunction with many providers who contribute to the Internet infrastructure. These providers include Internet service providers (ISP's) and other owners of network facilities, publishers and other content providers and distributors and re-distributors of content, each playing a role in the dissemination of media content.
Publishers produce digital content and distributors distribute the digital content for audience (e.g., users, viewers, readers, listeners, etc.) consumption using various different reimbursement or payment models for the distributed content. One such model is to charge recipients of digital media based on a contract that is charged according to a flat rate for distribution of a broad range of content and types of content. For example, cable television viewers are charged monthly for access to all of the programming available on a designated station or group of stations during a month time period. In some situations, Internet service providers charge a monthly fee for unlimited access to content during a month time period. Internet content providers distribute content using variety of other reimbursement models, such as charging by the title, by a specified access time such as a number of access hours during a month or yearly time period or by a one time charge.
In some situations, publishers receive payment for media usage in the form of money. At other times, publishers provide content in exchange for advertising exposure (or some other media exchange) in which the distributor displays publisher-provided advertising to users. In that case, for example, a publisher provides a distributor with video programming. The programming includes embedded advertising that the distributor distributes to users along with the video programming. In turn, by displaying the embedded advertising to users, the distributor covers the publisher's fee for the media provided to the distributor by the publisher.
At times, the distribution path of media content is such that the media content is distributed by one distributor to other distributors or to more than one other distributor before the media content ultimately reaches its audience. In this situation, the original publisher or other intermediate distributors of the media content may actually charge the down-line intermediate distributors for the media content being re-distributed.
Another method of handling content distribution over a network is for a publisher to code the provided content with digital rights information in order to limit user access to the content, based on predefined agreements between the publisher and users. In one example of the use of digital rights management techniques, a publisher sends digital rights information in the form of a digital rights management specification language (e.g., such as ODRL, XRML, etc.) to a user, along with media content such as video content. The digital rights information may designate, for example, that a specified user who provides a designated password, for a predefined number of viewing times, only authorizes the video content for display and that the distributor is not authorized to copy the video to another recipient user host. Upon receipt by the user, software configured to display the video content can also limit usage of the content accordingly.
There are various conventional coding techniques for providing identification of media content. Extensible Mark-Up Language (XML) is a text labeling language that can be applied to individual elements of documents or other media content in order to label the individual elements of the content so that they can be more easily identified, typed, analyzed, processed and/or interpreted, etc. The XML language provides a series of statements including tags and content labels that can be used to identify and characterize elements of the content. XML can format various types of content such as text and files, for example, with audio and images.
Other techniques exist to provide unique identification of media content that may be distributed over a network. For example, transmission devices can attach digital signatures to an electronically transmitted message in order to uniquely identify the sender of the document. The purpose of a digital signature is to authenticate that the entity sending the message is really the entity that claims to have sent the message. Digital signatures employ the use of encryption techniques that are applied to the sent and received messages in order to guarantee the unforgeability of the signature.